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The Atari 800XL

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52 pointsjdkee20 comments

This blog reminds me of -me- back in the day. I cut my teeth on programming bad Atari BASIC games, but eventually I learned 6502 assembly and wrote my own disassembler, modem routines, etc... heady days!

And funny timing, this weekend I (finally) plugged in and got working an old 800XL I bought on eBay about a year ago -- but after purchasing the machine, it gathered dust while I got distracted with so many other things. :-)

This Atari came with 100s of floppy disks and a folder with dot-matrix printouts cataloging the files on each disk. Previous owner had the machine for decades and was very meticulous. It also came with a 1050 disk drive which makes scary wheezing noises when the disk spins, lol. I don't think I'll use the disk drive much since everything interesting is downloadable nowadays in seconds in ATR image format; I also picked up a SIO port to serial adapter, so I can link the Atari to my laptop. It's pretty amazing, the Atari sees my laptop as a disk drive using RespeQt [1] on the laptop. It is -so- much faster/easier than actually dealing with the disks like back in the day.

And if you thought disks were slow... this machine also came with a cassette drive (!!) but it needs some lube or something, the rotors don't spin at the right speed. I kinda want to show some of my students the slow speed at which we used to be tortured: ten minutes to load a single game, and that only if you were lucky enough for it to load successfully on the first try...

The most interesting aspect of this experiment is the speed at which technology operates now: I had forgotten just how slow everything was. A simpler time.

[1] RespeQT - https://github.com/RespeQt/RespeQt

> This Atari came with 100s of floppy disks and a folder with dot-matrix printouts cataloging the files on each disk.

Please consider taking full dumps of these disks and uploading them to the Internet Archive software collection. Floppy disk data are extremely fragile, and the Internet Archive is one of very few institutions that can take advantage of existing copyright exemptions for libraries to properly store such content for the foreseeable future.

Please explain how to do that? It seems easier said than done!

You need an SIO2SD or SIO2USB device. It plugs into the SIO port on the Atari and reads/writes to an SD card. You can then save disk images from the disk drive to the SD card. Transfer the SD card to a modern computer and upload the image files to the internet archive.

There’s lot of info on the web about this, even YouTube videos if you prefer that. But here’s one random discussion:

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/306652-copying-files-from-...

Google terms like “Atari copy disk image to SIO2SD” and similar.

I'd suggest the Greaseweazle, which lets you use a PC and PC drive.

https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle

I haven't tested this, it's on my to do list.

> This Atari came with 100s of floppy disks

It sounds like these are homemade collections of software, not off-the-shelf store-bought stuff.

If I’m right, then this is the real gem of your collection, not the hardware. That hardware is much easier to come by than homemade, personal collections of disks. In fact, such collections are exceedingly rare and very expensive if you can find them at all. Sellers will often break a collection and sell one disk at a time for crazy prices like $10-20 each, without even knowing if the disk works.

I sincerely regret selling my collection about 15 years ago. I don’t regret selling the hardware.

This. Please image those disks. You may find you have something that has not been backed up to the Internet until now. Pretty sure I had at least one C64 demo that I have yet to be able to find online in over 20 years of looking.

I'm the original author of AspeQt (of which RespeQt is a fork: the maintainer after me turned out to be hard to get along with, so the guys in the AtariAge community forked it). Great to see it still brings joy to people after all these years.

This was my first computer, it was great. I did really miss having the ability to have multiple text colours on the same screen. It couldn't do that, though there was a trick where you could combine rows of multiple display modes by fiddling with the "display list interrupt".

PS This writeup is not great, very basic.

It was a good computer, a friend had one and I had a Commodore 64. The 64 had better sound and sprites, but the Atari had better color and animation.

I liked the SIO system. Device independent I/O was nicely done.

K: Keyboard C: Cassette (slooooow) Dn: Disk drive P: Printer

Today, we have a device called FujiNET. It is basically a serial to Internet bridge.

N: For Network

And most programs just work across the Internet despite being 30 years old. Once the N: handler was done, Atari computers basically are networked.

Programming with the Internet works like serial does, and there have been a couple multi player games written in BASIC that perform nicely.

I plan on getting one for my 800XL one day in the near future.

The FujiNET is being made to worn with other machines too. They all vary in how this kind of thing can be made to happen. The Atari will end up a benchmark, or reference.

SIO today is seen as a very early USB type implementation that offered capability for up to 30 devices to coexist on the serial bus.

Pretty damn spiffy, and I feel it is one of the better features. Each 8 bitter has at least one stand out thing. On the Atari, this is one stand out often underappreciated.

The Apple had slots and an assembler monitor.

C64 had great sound, sprites, nice user port.

The designer of the SIO worked on the USB.

Thanks for confirming that. I think I read about those things happening somewhere, and just wasn't really sure at the time I wrote my comment

And Atari DOS was written by the same people that wrote DOS for the Apple ][. Shepardson Microsystems. The book ‘The Atari BASIC Source Book, written by some ot the same people is still an interesting read today.

The Atari 800XL is the machine I wanted, the TI-99/4A is the machine I got.

My brother and I spent a pretty good chunk of one summer writing games on the TI. I’m very thankful to my Mom for indulging 11 year old me and getting me started on this path.

This was my first computer. I learned BASIC and did some "drawing" in the graphics mode. A few years ago I tested and it was running. Time passes.

I always just thought of this as a games machine because of the cartridges so I never really learned to program it. But I loved things like Submarine Commander and I still think of the version of Centipede on these machines as canonical. Good times.

Adrian's Digital Basement just happen to have released a video on the Atari 800.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X-IMg5yMQA

Apparently I have conflated the memories of a lot of the computers I had back then. I will NEVER forget those metal buttons running down the right side, but I could have sworn the 800XL looked different inside.

Fond memories and the tape drive I had to play games that we're on the cartridge.

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